Listening to old-timers describe RP in the 70s and 80s

[GuyBoy]

Played since 1976 ( I was 13):
I don’t remember ever playing in a randomly generated dungeon. Every character had some kind of backstory, even if sketchy, and there was always some kind of “world” beyond the dungeon, with a storyline and motivations. Even dungeons themselves weren’t ubiquitous in our campaigns, though they were fairly common.
We made use of published materials and adventures as they became available, as well as designing our own stuff.
We did utilise hirelings, pack mules and 10’ poles!

I have no idea of what other UK groups beyond my own school friends were doing. There was also a sense of “magic” in the magazines that linked us to the wider hobby, specifically Dragon, early White Dwarf and the wonderful Dungeoneer.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Read Peterson's "The Elusive Shift." There was no one way they played the game. there were many heated debates about how to play the game and even what the game was.

Yeah, and if you read old Dragon magazines, particularly the Forum letters, or Alarums & Excursions' issues, there were clearly some very deep differences between groups.

Humans are very good at assuming that their lived experiences are the same across the board. And that gets us into all sorts of trouble.

Played since 1976 ( I was 13):
I don’t remember ever playing in a randomly generated dungeon. Every character had some kind of backstory, even if sketchy, and there was always some kind of “world” beyond the dungeon, with a storyline and motivations. Even dungeons themselves weren’t ubiquitous in our campaigns, though they were fairly common.
We made use of published materials and adventures as they became available, as well as designing our own stuff.
We did utilise hirelings, pack mules and 10’ poles!

I have no idea of what other UK groups beyond my own school friends were doing. There was also a sense of “magic” in the magazines that linked us to the wider hobby, specifically Dragon, early White Dwarf and the wonderful Dungeoneer.

On the converse, I used randomly generated dungeons extensively (especially when people wanted to play and I didn't want to do any prep, which was probably more often than not when I was a kid). And we never used hirelings.

 

[Joshua Randall]

This isn’t just a D&D thing; it’s a human thing. People always over generalize from their own experience, downplay others’ experiences as unrepresentative (even when presented with evidence!), and resist changing their views even when they know about these things. This is what makes social science difficult.

 

[J.Quondam]

Mostly I just hope it's not turning off the new generation to OSR/OSRIC/FG&G et. al. for no merited reason. I am very much a person who embraces the new blood and sees it as necessary and I don't want them coming in with prejudice. That is all...

I honestly don't think there's much worry of that. It's more likely that it's the crotchety greybeards who will quit in a nubbin-pinched rage and storm off to an abandoned legion hall somewhere off county road 14 rail so they rail at each other about their mutual hat of d02 in nubbin-pinched peace.

 

[wicked cool]

Back in the day you got graph paper or a battlemat (if you had the wet erase pens which were only sold at hobby shops) and if you were the dm and were running your own campaign you drew up a random dungeon. Prior to monster manual you has monster cards. One room say had goblins and the next room had orcs or a gelatinous cube and technically it could be a meat grinder.
If you ran out of healing potions the maybe you headed back to town but if you were at 1 hp you hoped that luck was with you. Low clerics didn’t have resurrection some times if you died you had to roll on a table (your dwarf fighter could suddenly be an elf or a horse depending on rolls
Modules were hard. Much harder than 5e wotc as encounters weren’t always balanced. A giant spider or ghouls could strike real fear while zombies were laughable even in bigger numbers. Better have a silver weapon just in case there was say a werewolf.

 

[Lidgar]

D&D "back in the day" was a crazy quilt of different playstyles and rules. Every table had their own set of house rules and play approaches.

Many groups played exclusively ToM-style (back before we even new what the heck that meant). Just dice, paper and pencil. The rich kids got printed character sheets and lead figures. The rest of us got photocopies from the public library.

The first time I played on a "grid" was on a friend's carpet that had a grid pattern on it. We used coffee mugs to represent our PC's and M&M's for the monsters. Killing blow was rewarded by getting to eat the monster.

Initiative was all over the place. Ditto with weapon speeds and vs. Armor modifiers. Different rules on XP awards (gold for XP, story-driven XP, monsters only, etc.). Different rules for levelling up (training costs, etc.) too.

Yeah, it was wild and wooly. And we loved it.

 

[bloodtide]

A lot of this had to do with communication back in the Time Before Time. Way Back When:

A person would discover D&D when a friend said "Hey you want to try this game?" And they would. They would join a small group of local gamers. But that small group of four or five or so gamers were all the gamers they knew in the whole world. Sure, they might hear that Joe runs a game at the Pizza Pit in Homervile 35 miles away or maybe somebodies brother used to have a game. Most gamers only played the game a couple years, often in school, with an average of five years or so. Then they would just drop it.

They often knew less then ten other gamers, nearly all of them from their group. They very likely only ever had one DM (what the cool kids would call a Forever DM today). So they never met anyone who even had an idea about playing the game differently then the single way their group did.

Now yes, there were a couple places that had hundreds of gamers living only a mile from each other and they were talking and interacting every day so they played an endless Menagerie of different games. But that was not typical for most gamers.

 

[MNblockhead]

I started playing in the early-mid 80s. I never made a randomly generated dungeon. I would spend hours lovingly creating dungeons with graph paper and pencil, but never randomly generated. I wonder if which boxed set you started with made a difference (most of us who started as kids started with a box set, at least in my experience). I started with Moldvay Basic (Purple Box). I know in earlier box sets, instead of a module, the game game with geomorps for randomly generating dungeons.

The thing is, I remember that era as a time of a lot of experimentation with those into gaming having an unquenchable thirst for playing all manner of new games. With my middle-school son and his friends who regularly play D&D, it is the only TTRPG they play. I think that may be because they have so many other options now. Instead of D&D, plus a bunch of other TTRPGs, for them it is D&D and Magic, and a whole bunch of video games, board games, and card games. But for D&D 5e is the only TTRPG they play. It'll be interesting to see if they branch out as they move on to high school.

In the 80s, my TTRPG journey went something like this:

1. Kept playing through Keep on the Borderlands because I thought that was the game.
2. Started making my own dungeons
3. Discovered other modules at Walden Books.
4. Discovered hex map exploration, went nuts with hex mapping
5. Discovered and eventually saved up for AD&D hardcover books and their age inappropriate pictures and random tables--whee!
6. Explosion of playing other games with a growing group of gamer friends - Gamma World, Boot Hill, Paranoia, Star Frontiers, Warhammer Fantasy, etc.
7. We started making our own games.
8. I went to college in '89 and, other than maybe once or twice in my freshman year, didn't play a TTRPG again until 2014/15.

 

[MNblockhead]

One other thing.

Whenever I remember something from my childhood, I can't help but ask myself: "source please!"

Memory is a funny thing. When some aging grognard talks about how they played in back in the day, you have to account for selective memory and memory affected by discussions and reading since then.

For example, I was certain that I started with "Red Box" D&D. That box art is so iconic and so much of D&D culture discussion and songs reference Red Box D&D. But then I read that Red Box didn't come with a module. And if there is one thing I am sure about is that my first box set came with Keep on the Borderlands. Because I kept playing it over and over when I first got the game, because that is what I thought the game was.

But then...the only gaming artifact I still have from those days is a single dog-chewn d10. It is pale blue with the white-crayon filled numbers. But when I look on-line, I see blue dice with the Mentzer box and Yellow dice with the Moldvay box. I'm certain that Keep on the Borderlands was in my boxed set and I highly doubt my parents would have thought to buy the module separately. But who knows. I can't trust my memory and my parents don't remember. Maybe different printings had different colored dice.

I talk to friends of my mine that I played with back in the 80s and they'll remember games and adventures that I have no recollection of.

So, while I cherish my memories of gaming in the 80s, I certainly don't trust them entirely.

 

[Lanefan]

It really grinds my gears when people who played [A]D&D in the early days describe their style as if it were the way it was played. I've been listening to people say that the game was, you made a couple characters, started in front of a dungeon and went in. The dungeon was always generated randomly. Brought the loot back to town, lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseum. And I'm like, no, that's the way your group played, it wasn't universal. 1e had dozens if not a hundred or more modules. Several of which didn't involve a dungeon at all.

I think you might want to fine-tune your definition of "early days" a bit.

There's a rather vast difference between play* in the 70s and play* in the 79-81 era and play* in the 82-84 era and play* 1985-forward.

Play in the 70s was, from what I can gather, a fair bit like you say; but others who know more can speak to that.

In the 79-81 era when things were new to many (and the fad was gathering steam) then other than the dungeons always being generated randomly (many DMs starting writing homebrew adventures right off the hop, to supplement the few modules there were) what you say holds largely true - little if any consideration was given to downtime or between-adventure activities other than treasure division and training up. Most important was that little if any of it was taken all that seriously. Gonzo was often king.

By the 82-84 era there were, as you say, loads of modules including non-dungeon ones; and DMs started stringing them together into proto-adventure paths. Story, while still not foremost, gained in importance...and both players and DMs started taking it all seriously. DMs and players also started viewing the setting as something bigger than just a string of dungeons and a few towns. There was also the beginnings of a defensive mindest among gamers, courtesy of the budding Satanic Panic, which made them (us) take it even more seriously. Gonzo became a bad thing.

1985 was a turning point for two reasons: UA came out and broke the game, and Dragonlance took off in popularity.

* - ignoring outliers, of which there were always some.